In yet another post on the ongoing battle between Adam Kotsko and the world over the influence and meaning of Slavoj Zizek, Adam writes:
For all the “fame” Zizek has attained, the extent of his actual impact is difficult to assess. He makes a good point in this regard when responding to one of several contributors who are openly resentful of his current celebrity status: when it comes to actual academic influence (hiring, grants, grad students, etc.), Zizek himself is incredibly marginal.
A number of comments suggest Adam is plain nuts; viz.,
Zizek doesn’t seem to have a concentrated base of influence — no Yale or UCI for him. But he does have a vast series of connections, across numerous departments. These aren’t departments per se, but permanent fixtures within universities, at which people who study and study with Zizek establish and run. Remember the Humanities Research Institute? It’s a UC-wide institute, so one year it’ll be here, the next at UCLA, &c. But Zizek’s a member of it, and it’s run by people who have studied with him. Zizek has networks like this across the US and Europe. They’re not traditional institutions, granted, but 1) they’re housed at traditional institutions and 2) he seems to prefer to spend the year traveling between them, and could certainly set up shop somewhere, if he wanted to.
Evidently this is proof-positive that Zizek runs the world (or something). But this is also beside the point. Presumably Adam has in mind the ability of Zizek to form a school and, from there, assist his students in getting jobs in prominent philosophy (theology?) departments thus creating a space in Zizek-Hegelian-Lacanianism can be practiced and consequently have an influence on the discipline as a whole.
Being neither a philosopher nor a theologian (nor, indeed, someone in an English or literature department), I can’t comment on the prospects of Zizekians there. I can, however, comment on the prospects of a committed Zizekian getting a job in a Canadian sociology department. What follows is a “response to my critics” piece by Neil McLaughlin who, in my view, would like to lead Canadian sociology in the direction of a disciplinary structure resembling that as it is practiced in the United States.
A major challenge for our discipline, in my view, is for us to avoid the twin errors of being an academic enterprise that encourages abstract arm-chair theorizing without evidence, or a narrow discipline that privileges a-theoretical quantitative data on the one hand (number crunching!), or under-theorized qualitative ethnography on the other (as in purely descriptive ethnography or excessively “grounded” theory). I would like to see a Canadian sociology that is theoretically driven, methodologically diverse, and empirically rigorous. Baer is right to suggest that Canadian sociology’s commitment to keeping statistics requirements in our programs is not as secure as my essay suggested. What he does not say enough about however, is the threat that the social theory “fad” poses to empirically oriented sociology in Canada that could combine interpretive, historical-comparative, and multivariate statistical methods. We need to be able to discuss openly the fact that many post-structuralist and cultural studies theorists without training in empirical sociology are intolerant of just the kind of methodological diversity we need to keep the discipline strong. Sydie, for example, tells us that things are fine at the University of Alberta, since there is lots of statistical research being done there alongside of social theory.
This response misses the core point. The danger I see for Canadian sociology is that it becomes a totally fragmented discipline. In this possible future, our theorists do analysis of the writings of Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Foucault, Butler, or Derrida with little reference to the world beyond the text. Since scholars of this orientation trained outside of sociology usually have little background in empirical research beyond discourse analysis, we are institutionalizing a style of work hostile to our discipline’s empirical research core. As a result of this “Alberta compromise,” our researchers will be more likely to produce statistical applied work with no connection to sociological theory, since increasingly they will have been trained by theorists who themselves do not engage in two-way dialogue with the empirical wing of sociology. Overall, almost a third of associate and assistant-level faculty at Alberta (from data on their website) do not have a PhD in sociology. Within the PhD level specialization of Theory and Culture, where presumably leadership will come in the teaching of graduate sociological theory, the number of professors lacking PhDs in sociology doubles to 60%. While there is still statistical sociology at Alberta and good young faculty hired, the department seems to have cut a deal that allows the “social theorists” and the “researchers” to live together in peace without attempting to link the empirical wing of the discipline with its theoretical “core.” Such a compromise exemplifies the larger “coming crisis” and does not establish the foundation for a strong and cohesive discipline at a national level.
The place of interdisciplinary social theory in Canadian sociology must be discussed seriously and openly. As new scholars tied into emerging trends in the discipline, both Johnston and White are right to stress the need for sociologists to dialogue with the ideas coming out of the contemporary critical humanities and social theory. Johnston is surely on to something when she suggests that serious engagements with ideas that come from outside our traditional disciplinary core are essential for maintaining disciplinary vibrancy: her example of ecological concerns is compelling and Marx is an earlier example of the process. And White’s stress on the need for theoretical consistency and rigour is compelling, even if I disagree with much of how she defines theory and do not find all of the thinkers she draws on particularly useful. Having read published work by both Johnston and White, I know they are committed to a sociological imagination that links theory with multimethod empirical research (Johnston 2000; Johnston 2003; White 2005). But what are the terms of the dialogue they are proposing?
There are serious tradeoffs involved here and choices to be made. What of the opportunity costs, as economists like to put it, of focusing on social theory debates as opposed to dealing with traditional sociological issues of inequality (Myles 2003)? What theories and theorists should we read and teach? What do we do with theories and theorists who are fundamentally involved in a different project from a theoretically oriented, empirically oriented, multi-method social science, be it speculative linguistic philosophy, moral philosophy, normative social criticism, descriptive demography, or highly abstract rational choice oriented economic theory? Canadian undergraduate textbooks, like the American versions, are increasingly treating Naomi Klein as a sociological theorist, just as one influential American theory texts includes Martin Luther King, Jr. From my perspective, both these thinkers are important public intellectuals and political actors (and King, along with Mandela, is one of the great political figures of the 20th century!), but to frame them as sociological theorists is to dilute our disciplinary core beyond recognition. In addition, while Derrida, Lacan, Foucault, and Habermas are clearly part of our broader intellectual environment, for better or worse, attempts to define them as core sociological theorists strikes me as seriously problematic. It is fine to say we should be more “open” but if we define public intellectual work and social theory as sociological theory, we will close down space in the discipline for empirically oriented formal theory (network theory, exchange theory, empirically oriented Marxist, and Neo-Weberian approaches etc) and the rich micro symbolic interactionist tradition that is well developed in Canada.
From my perspective, we need to preserve empirically oriented sociological theory that is engaged in direct dialogue with empirical research in the field of sociology. In our graduate training, I do not see the purpose of primarily orienting our PhD programs around close readings of the “classics” or debating the post-modern literary critics (although surely we should retain a link to classical sociological theory in our work, and know a little about recent intellectual developments). The more we do the “close reading of texts” that White suggests, the less time and resources available for the theoretical work of linking the sociological theoretical tradition to on-going empirical research. Given the flat structure of Canadian higher education that creates enormous pressure to get students out of our PhD programs quickly at the same time as we require them to publish even as graduate students, saying we should do more of everything is not a serious answer. The trade-offs are real. Who decides, and on what basis? This is a serious challenge for Canadian sociology.
Neil McLaughlin (2006) “Whither the Future of Canadian Sociology? Thoughts on Moving Forward,” Canadian Journal of Sociology 31(1), 115-7.
5 Comments
wow Craig, that’s interesting. Sounds like McLaughlin knows the ‘Alberta compromise’ better than that department itself. Against his reading, and as a member of the department itself,I believe there is a considerable amount of interaction between ‘the theorists’ and the ‘empiricists’. Obviously there are methodological differences, but I do not believe sociology should have ‘one method.’
Does anyone really think it is fair to suggest that my piece argues for sociology having one method?
I mean, really.. Read the piece..
A little intellectual honesty would be nice…
Neil McLaughlin
Neil, thanks for your comment. I take it that your comment is primarily addressed at NotOften and, so, I won’t comment on it – although Neil is correct: he does speak highly of what he calls (if memory serves) a “multimodal” or “multi-methods” sociology.
For my part, this isn’t my problem with your stance, Neil. I would put forward two levels of criticism. The first relates to what I take to be your normative position – Canadian sociology needs higher standards of academic output. As many of your interlocutors have pointed out, this position itself is not especially debatable – afterall, who isn’t in favour of better scholarship? The more important question in this regard is how to accomplish this goal and what this means for the disciplinary structure of sociology in Canada. On the face of it, it seems that you would endorse (more or less) an American model of the discipline being imported into Canada. Afterall, you point to both the “institutional flatness” characteristic of Canadian schools and you point to the importance of publishing in the official journals of the ASA. If being a top sociologist means publishing in Social Forces, then I have no desire to be a top sociologist! For my part, the comparative weakness of sociology is, in a sense, its strength: due to porous boundaries between itself, political science, women’s studies, law and society, political economy, history and political economy (&c) far more interesting problematics can be generated in the Canadian context than in the American context (with, of course, a few notable exceptions) – I’d point to recent graduates of Carleton’s PhD program as an example: Powell’s work on genocide and state violence, Smith’s work on “the vitamin concept,” White’s work on both civility and citizenship and her more recent work on early twentieth century social theory, Datta’s more “traditional” work on Durkheim, Althusser and Foucault, etc.
The more important questions (in my mind) relate to your meta-theoretical analysis; viz., the relation between “theory” and “method” in what you call a “theory driven sociology.” The problem here – and I will be brief! – is that, on the one hand, you appear to endorse a rather reductionist and deflationary account of theory (see your response to White) and, on the other hand, a rather instrumentalist account of theory (the concept of “theory-driven”). Ultimately, your account of theory borders upon an open endorsement of “social theory” as providing the material for “hypothesis testing” and a move within social theory from its traditional concerns to more formal concerns (I get the vague impression that while you aren’t in favour of seminars on Marx’s Capital, you would be in favour of seminars on formal modeling or rational choice).
Lastly, as my second point within the “theory” paragraph indicates, I think there is a major problem in your conceptualization of the relation between “theory” and “method.” But this is a large epistemological can of worms…!
Well sure Neil, I’ll accept your passive shot (presumably aimed at my comment) as being only partially justified (“only” because my comment was meant as a very general comment to Craig’s very general post, and not as an exercise in conducting a close reading your article — if you would like several of those, actually read the responses to your article in the journal again).
But, by the way, I hardly think that you should be considered the agent of intellectual honesty considering that you develop criticisms of particular departments in Canada by browsing their websites. Why not interact with its scholars, or even visit it? Why not rely on some stringent data, perhaps even of the qualitative sort? I think that you ought to admit that the normative claims you make in the article do not follow from the “small empirical excursion” you conduct. For example:
“Or will Canadian sociologists just combine Derrida and demography, Baudrillard and biology, Lacan and LISREL in incoherent and warring departments?”
Now, is this an intellectually honest comment, or something that sounds more like an off-handed remark made at a pub? At least my comment was published in a blog in response to a rather surface level post. You are the one, Neil, who calls “Alberta’s” well-distinguished (former) chair little more than a PR partisan… Now is that fair or just plain ad hominem?
1. Craig said,
December 28, 2007 at 12:51 pm
Neil, thanks for your comment. I take it that your comment is primarily addressed at NotOften and, so, I won’t comment on it – although Neil is correct: he does speak highly of what he calls (if memory serves) a “multimodal” or “multi-methods” sociology.
Neil:Yes, Craig my comment was directed at NotOften. I had meant to find the time to write regarding your comments, which I disagree with but find reasonable and useful. I am glad I waited, since your comments below give me more to dialogue with. The issues are real, and you make reasonable and thoughtful points that allow for real dialogue. Clearly I do not argue for a single method – multi-method is the phrase I use that comes mostly from Robert Alford The Craft of Inquiry (1998), at least in the way I use it.
Craig wrote: For my part, this isn’t my problem with your stance, Neil. I would put forward two levels of criticism. The first relates to what I take to be your normative position – Canadian sociology needs higher standards of academic output. As many of your interlocutors have pointed out, this position itself is not especially debatable – afterall, who isn’t in favour of better scholarship?
Neil:Well, actually I do think this question is debatable. There has been a rather spirited debate in Canada about these questions since the Brym and Curtis pieces on Canadian sociology appeared leading to my pieces and the responses. We got close to debating some of the issues when I spoke at York last year. So there is a debate, but it is true that it not possible to decide the question based on objective scientific standards or tests. Whose standards, determined how? These questions always comes to the fore; there is no way around this, and discursive debate not empirical tests are the central way the issues will be addressed. Although I do think some empirical measures, like the citation counts Baer put together can move the debate forward….
Craig wrote: The more important question in this regard is how to accomplish this goal and what this means for the disciplinary structure of sociology in Canada.
Neil:There is secondary sociological issue regarding the relationship between certain ways quality is defined and the social structure of disciplines. These issues are related, in both ways…
But on to your core points, below…
Craig wrote: On the face of it, it seems that you would endorse (more or less) an American model of the discipline being imported into Canada.
Neil:Since I get to decide what I endorse ( although you or others could say that my positions will lead to something whatever I belief or argue for), I will have to disagree with your account of my position here while allowing that your view on the face of it, is a good faith effort to represent my position. The more or less, is key, of course, but I do not want an American model of the discipline in Canada at all, but argue for the view that we should attempt to build our own relatively unique version of discipline without uncritical adoption of either the American, British or French intellectual approaches, styles of structures. There are interesting questions here regarding what a national tradition means, both in general in the social and human sciences and in light of globalization. A longer discussion would be required to get into this, but I rather explicitly argue that we (Canadian sociology) should be more multi–method than the Americans and avoid the hegemony of ASR/AJS/Social Forces. The kind of sociology I argue for is very far away from the core mainstream American sociology. I was trained at CUNY, a quality department on the margins of the discipline. And I argue that we should become more professionalized with stronger boundaries, without becoming something like American psychology or economics today. For me, this would draw on lots of sociology from around the world including some British, French and German sociology alongside more American-style sociology than we have now. American style sociology, of course, is a very broad category, of course, and one can ask how much people really know about American sociology departments and journals, when debating this? But this would be a larger question. By the way, my earlier work was on German
social critic and psychoanalytic sociologist Erich Fromm, someone who played a role in the 40s, 50s and 60s in academic intellectual culture very similar to Zizek today. The value of the kind of psychoanalytic approach represented by Fromm in comparison to the Lacanian tradition would be a very different intellectual discussion that I will leave perhaps for another time, although this would require getting away from some of the simplistic polemics promoted by both Marcuse and the Lacanians regarding “neo-Freudian revisionism.” I will just say for now that writing about and for Fromm as well as David Riesman (someone else I have written about) puts me very much on the margins of the American sociological tradition that you argue that I argue for. I would say far “less” rather than “more” is the way to describe my relationship to American sociology although I have published in a number of American sociology journals, attend the meetings regularly and dialogue seriously with the traditions within this vast intellectual enterprise. My favourite American sociologist? Alvin Gouldner, a renegade figure very much on the margins of the discipline although trained at its center…. I don’t expect you, of course, to have known this background I bring to the piece you were commenting on, but I offer the comments above as a clarification rather than a correction.
A straightforward correction of the distorted view that I am for a single method sociology is appropriate, however, and I thank you for this.
Craig wrote: Afterall, you point to both the “institutional flatness” characteristic of Canadian schools and you point to the importance of publishing in the official journals of the ASA.
Neil:First, the flatness issue.
I am rather clearly in my essays an opponent of the kind of educational system the American have. It produces a lot of quality work, as well as a lot of nonsense. My opposition to the American system is primarily political, based on my sociological understanding of what the private educational system in the US does to the society there, and its relationship to the rest of the world.
Over and above this normative position, one can still try to do an analyze of consequences for the social organization of knowledge of a relatively flat system….
Craig:If being a top sociologist means publishing in Social Forces, then I have no desire to be a top sociologist!
Neil:Since I don’t know you, and you get to define your own goals, I am not sure how to respond really.
Social Forces is only one journal of many I discussed. I think quality scholars should be publishing in a variety of places, and some of the quality American journals would count a lot, in my view, when ranking candidates for jobs and tenure……
As Bourdieu taught us (although I learned this from Gouldner earlier!), academic disciplines and professions are fields of power and competition, and all fields have to set standards. You have to choose what “rules of the game” you want to play. My earlier work on Fromm was partly a critique of the rules of the game of American sociology, but formulated in a style that could be published in sociology journals… I choose that path, and I benefited both professionally and intellectually.. We all choose our own paths, in circumstances not of our own choosing…
Craig wrote:For my part, the comparative weakness of sociology is, in a sense, its strength: due to porous boundaries between itself, political science, women’s studies, law and society, political economy, history and political economy (&c) far more interesting problematics can be generated in the Canadian context than in the American context (with, of course, a few notable exceptions)
Neil:Your position is, of course, the “weakness as strength” position I critique (drawing on Fuller’s account of British sociology).
One can measure, I think, the effects of certain variables (closed versus open boundaries) on the institutional strength of disciplines. This is an empirical question, although a complicated one…
But what is an “interesting problematic” – again, I could throw back your argument against me. How do we define and debate what is an interesting problematic? Who gets to decide,on what criteria.
The same problem as the standards issue,no?
Craig wrote:
- I’d point to recent graduates of Carleton’s PhD program as an example: Powell’s work on genocide and state violence, Smith’s work on “the vitamin concept,” White’s work on both civility and citizenship and her more recent work on early twentieth century social theory, Datta’s more “traditional” work on Durkheim, Althusser and Foucault, etc.
Neil:I don’t know this work(expect white’s- I like what I have seen), but I will look for it as it appears in the journals….
There is lots of good work coming out of graduate programs in the US, Canada and elsewhere… How to compare and evaluate? Interesting questions..
Craig wrote:The more important questions (in my mind) relate to your meta-theoretical analysis; viz., the relation between “theory” and “method” in what you call a “theory driven sociology.” The problem here – and I will be brief! – is that, on the one hand, you appear to endorse a rather reductionist and deflationary account of theory (see your response to White) and, on the other hand, a rather instrumentalist account of theory (the concept of “theory-driven”). Ultimately, your account of theory borders upon an open endorsement of “social theory” as providing the material for “hypothesis testing” and a move within social theory from its traditional concerns to more formal concerns (I get the vague impression that while you aren’t in favour of seminars on Marx’s Capital, you would be in favour of seminars on formal modeling or rational choice).
Neil:This would be worth more discussion.
Can you be a little clearer what you mean by “reductionist” and “deflationary”
Who would argue for a reductionist and deflationary type of theory? Perhaps you could translate your point in different terms so I might be able to recognize my own views in your account?
On your second more concrete point about what seminars I am in “favour of”, this is a complex question. I was a neo-Marxist in my youth, and worked and took classes with some of the major neo- Marxists including Michael Harrington, Alan Wolfe (now ex-Marxist),Robert Alford, Marshal Berman and Stanley Aronowitz. I can well see the value of a seminar on Capital, and see it as part of sociology. I am skeptical of the value of this kind of work, however, at this historical moment in Canadian sociology. It is not something that I am against, although I would not prioritize it as something our departments “need’.
I don’t actually teach much formal theory a la rational choice theory or network theory. I am against a sociology that defines theory only in this formal way above, but do think more Canadian sociologists should know something about these approaches along with a variety of others…. I certainly think it is more important to dialogue with rational choice or network theory than dialogue with Lacan or Derrida…
Craig:Lastly, as my second point within the “theory” paragraph indicates, I think there is a major problem in your conceptualization of the relation between “theory” and “method.” But this is a large epistemological can of worms…!
Neil:Be happy to dialogue with you more on this, once you spell out what you mean…..
2. NotOften said,
December 28, 2007 at 11:46 pm
Well sure Neil, I’ll accept your passive shot (presumably aimed at my comment) as being only partially justified (”only” because my comment was meant as a very general comment to Craig’s very general post, and not as an exercise in conducting a close reading your article — if you would like several of those, actually read the responses to your article in the journal again).
Neil:No need to do a close reading of my piece: just a basic look at it would reveal the centrality of the multi-method approach to my argument…..
NotOften:
But, by the way, I hardly think that you should be considered the agent of intellectual honesty considering that you develop criticisms of particular departments in Canada by browsing their websites. Why not interact with its scholars, or even visit it? Why not rely on some stringent data, perhaps even of the qualitative sort? I think that you ought to admit that the normative claims you make in the article do not follow from the “small empirical excursion” you conduct. For example:
Neil:Well, I actually have been at your department, since I attended the Learneds there, and spoke at a panel with Doug Aoki. I have read a large amount of the scholarship produced by the faculty, observed a number of your graduate students at various Congress meetings. And did, in fact, gather data on the Phds of the faculty and, this is central, COMPARED it to other programs. It is an interesting epistemological argument you are making that only the members of the department really know what is going on there. I would say the opposite; knowing a department requires comparing it to others…
In any case, I would be happy to visit your department again, and have an open and honest debate with faculty and students about some of these issues. I spoke at York, last year and it was fun and productive. And civil.
NotOften wrote:
“Or will Canadian sociologists just combine Derrida and demography, Baudrillard and biology, Lacan and LISREL in incoherent and warring departments?”
Now, is this an intellectually honest comment, or something that sounds more like an off-handed remark made at a pub? At least my comment was published in a blog in response to a rather surface level post.
Neil:Well, the truth is, I thought about and refined this sentence – just the opposite of a pub remark. In addition to arguing for the need to lighten up and have a sense of humour about these matters, I would suggest that the tensions between these very different approaches to doing social science (well, more than tensions, D, B and L are,in my view, AGAINST social science as I understand it, and I am hardly alone among sociologists in this…) is something that does not bode well for a strong and intellectually vibrant sociology in Canada. This is what I believe, and thus my view is intellectually honest. You, on the other hand, misrepresented what my article said about methods…
NotOften: You are the one, Neil, who calls “Alberta’s” well-distinguished (former) chair little more than a PR partisan… Now is that fair or just plain ad hominem?
Neil wrote: NotOften, the former Alberta chair wrote a response to my piece that was, in fact a PR piece. It did not deal seriously with the larger questions most of the other critiques dealt with but engaged in the kind of listing of accomplishments that chairs write to Deans and external reviewers… Department PR..
That is not ad hominem attack at all….
I do not know Sydie as a person, and have found her work quite good and useful.
Her reponse to my piece, however WAS a puff PR piece.
Chairs and former chairs have to do such things…..But that does not make them serious contributions to the larger issues….
Perhaps we could actually have such broader discussion of the larger issues in your department sometime. I would love to do it….
Just would need some ground rules to make things civil! :)
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